DOCTOR AIN WAS recognized
on the Omaha-Chicago flight. A biologist colleague from Pasadena came out
of the toilet and saw Ain in an aisle seat. Five years before, this man
had been jealous of Ain's huge grants. Now he nodded coldly and was surprised
at the intensity of Ain's response. He almost turned back to speak, but
he felt too tired; like nearly everyone, he was fighting the flu.

The stewardess handing out
coats after they landed remembered Ain too: A tall thin nondescript man
with rusty hair. He held up the line staring at her; since he already had
his raincoat with him she decided it was some kooky kind of pass and waved
him on.

She saw Ain shamble off into
the airport smog, apparently alone. Despite the big Civil Defense signs,
O'Hare was late getting underground. No one noticed the woman.

The wounded, dying woman.

Ain was not identified en
route to New York, but a 2:40 jet carried an "Ames" on the checklist, which
was thought to be a misspelling of Ain. It was. The plane had circled for
an hour while Ain watched the smoky seaboard monotonously tilt, straighten,
and tilt again.

The woman was weaker now.
She coughed, picking weakly at the scabs on her face half-hidden behind
her long hair. Her hair, Ain saw, that great mane which had been so splendid,
was drabbed and thinning now. He looked to seaward, willing himself to
think of cold, clean breakers. On the horizon he saw a vast black rug:
somewhere a tanker had opened its vents. The woman coughed again. Ain closed
his eyes. Smog shrouded the plane.

He was picked up next while
checking in for the BOAC flight to Glasgow. Kennedy-Underground was a boiling
stew of people, the air system unequal to the hot September afternoon.
The check-in line swayed and sweated, staring dully at the newscast. SAVE
THE LAST GREEN MANSIONS—a conservation group was protesting the defoliation
and drainage of the Amazon basin. Several people recalled the beautifully
colored shots of the new clean bomb. The line squeezed together to let
a band of uniformed men go by. They were wearing buttons inscribed: WHO'S
AFRAID?

That was when a woman noticed
Ain. He was holding a newssheet and she heard it rattling in his hand.
Her family hadn't caught the flu, so she looked at him sharply. Sure enough,
his forehead was sweaty. She herded her kids to the side away from Ain.

He was using Instac
throat spray, she remembered. She didn't think much of Instac; her family
used Kleer. While she was looking at him, Ain suddenly turned his head
and stared into her face, with the spray still floating down. Such inconsiderateness!
She turned her back. She didn't recall him talking to any woman, but she
perked up her ears when the clerk read off Ain's destination. Moscow!

The clerk recalled that too,
with disapproval. Ain checked in alone, he reported. No woman had been
ticketed for Moscow, but it would have been easy enough to split up her
tickets. (By that time they were sure she was with him.)

Ain's flight went via Iceland
with an hour's delay at Keflavik. Ain walked over to the airport park,
gratefully breathing the sea-filled air. Every few breaths he shuddered.
Under the whine of bull-dozers the sea could be heard running its huge
paws up and down the keyboard of the land. The little park had a grove
of yellowed birches and a hock of wheatears foraged by the path. Next month
they would be in North Africa, Ain thought. Two thousand miles of tiny
wing beats. He threw them some crumbs from a packet in his pocket.

The woman seemed stronger
here. She was panting in the sea wind, her eyes on Ain. Above her the birches
were as gold as those where he had first seen her, the day his life began
. . . Squatting under a stump to watch a shrewmouse he had been, when he
caught a falling ripple of green and recognized the shocking, naked girl-flesh,
creamy, pink-tipped—coming toward him among the golden bracken! Young Ain
held his breath, his nose in the sweet moss and his heart going crash-crash.
And then he was staring at the outrageous fall of that hair down her narrow
back, watching it dance around her heart-shaped buttocks, while the shrewmouse
ran over his paralyzed hand. The lake was utterly still, dusty silver under
the misty sky, and she made no more than a muskrat’s ripple to rock the
floating golden leaves. The silence closed back, the trees like torches
where the naked girl had walked the wild wood, reflected in Ain’s shining
eyes. For a time he believed he had seen an Oread.

Ain was last on board for
the Glasgow leg. The stewardess recalled dimly that he seemed restless.
She could not identify the woman. There were a lot of women on board, and
babies. Her passenger list had several errors.

At Glasgow airport a waiter
remembered that a man like Ain had called for Scottish oatmeal, and eaten
two bowls, although of course it wasn't really oatmeal. A young mother
with a pram saw him tossing crumbs to the birds.

When he checked in at the
BOAC desk, he was hailed by a Glasgow professor who was going to the same
conference in Moscow. This man had been one of Ain’s teachers. (It was
not known that Ain had done his postgraduate work in Europe.) They chatted
all the way across the North Sea.

"I wondered about that," the
professor said later. "Why have you come 'round about? I asked him. He
told me the direct flights were booked up." (This was found to be untrue:
Ain had apparently avoided the Moscow jet hoping to escape attention.)

The professor spoke with relish
of Ain’s work.

"Brilliant? Oh, aye. And stubborn,
too; very very stubborn. It was as though a concept—often the simplest
relation, mind you—would stop him in his tracks, and fascinate him. He
would hunt all 'round it instead of going on to the next thing as a more
docile mind would. Truthfully, I wondered at first if he could be just
a bit thick. But you recall who it was said that the capacity for wonder
at matters of common acceptance occurs in the superior mind? And, of course,
so it proved when he shook us all up over that enzyme conversion business.
A pity your government took him away from his line, there. No, he said
nothing of this, I say it to you, young man. We spoke in fact largely of
my work. I was surprised to find he'd kept up. He asked me what my sentiments
about it were, which surprised me again. Now, understand, I’d not seen
the man for five years, but he seemed—well, perhaps just tired, as who
is not? I’m sure he was glad to have a change; he jumped out for a legstretch
wherever we came down. At Oslo, even Bonn. Oh yes, he did feed the birds,
but that was nothing new for Ain. His social life when I knew him? Radical
causes? Young man, I’ve said what I've said because of who it was that
introduced you, but I’ll have you know it is an impertinence in you to
think ill of Charles Ain, or that he could do a harmful deed. Good evening."

The professor said nothing
of the woman in Ain's life.

Nor could he have, although
Ain had been intimately with her in the university time. He had let no
one see how he was obsessed with her; with the miracle, the wealth of her
body, her inexhaustibility. They met at his every spare moment; sometimes
in public pretending to be casual strangers under his friends' grave formality;
And later in their privacies—what doubled intensity of love! He reveled
in her, possessed her, allowed her no secrets. His dreams were of her sweet
springs and shadowed places and her white rounded glory in the moonlight,
finding always more, always new dimensions of his joy.

The danger of her frailty
was far off then in the rush of birdsong and the springing leverets of
the meadow. On dark days she might cough a bit, but so did he . . . In
those years he had had no thought to the urgent study of disease.

At the Moscow conference nearly
everyone noticed Ain at some point or another, which was to be expected
in view of his professional stature. It was a small, high-caliber meeting.
Ain was late in; a day's reports were over, and his was to be on the third
and last.

Many people spoke with Ain,
and several sat with him at meals. No one was surprised that he spoke little;
he was a retiring man except on a few memorable occasions of hot argument.
He did strike some of his friends as a bit tired and jerky.

An Indian molecular engineer
who saw him with the throat spray kidded him about bringing over Asian
flu. A Swedish colleague recalled that Ain had been called away to the
transatlantic phone at lunch; and when he returned Ain volunteered the
information that some had turned up missing in his home lab. There was
another joke, and Ain said cheerfully, "Oh yes, quite active."

At that point one of the Chicom
biologists swung into his daily propaganda chores about bacteriological
warfare and accused Ain of manufacturing biotic weapons. Ain took the wind
out of his sails by saying: "You're perfectly right." By tacit consent,
there was very little talk about military applications, industrial dusting,
or subjects of that type. And nobody recalled seeing Ain with any woman
other than old Madame Valche, who could scarcely have subverted anyone
from her wheelchair.

Ain's one speech was bad,
even for him. He always had a poor public voice but his ideas were usually
expressed with the lucidity so typical of the first-rate mind. This time
he seemed muddled, with little new to say. His audience excused this as
the muffling effects of security. Ain then got into a tangled point about
the course of evolution in which he seemed to be trying to show that something
was very wrong indeed. When he wound up with a reference to Hudson's bell
bird "singing for a later race," several listeners wondered if he could
be drunk.

The big security break came
right at the end, when he suddenly began to describe the methods he had
used to mutate and redesign a leukemia virus. He explained the procedure
with admirable clarity in four sentences and paused. Then gave a terse
description of the effects of the mutated strain, which were maximal only
in the higher primates. Recovery rate among the lower mammals and other
orders was close to percent. As to vectors, he went on, any warm-blooded
animal served. In addition, the virus retained its viability in most environmental
media and performed very well airborne. Contagion rate was extremely high.
Almost off-hand, Ain added that no test primate or accidentally exposed
human had survived beyond the twenty-second day.

These words fell into a silence
broken only by the running feet of the Egyptian delegate making for the
door. Then a gilt chair went over as an American bolted after him.

Ain seemed unaware that his
audience was in a state of unbelieving paralysis. It had all come so fast:
a man who had been blowing his nose was staring popeyed around his handkerchief,
another who had been lighting a pipe grunted as his fingers singed. Two
men chatting by the door missed his words entirely and their laughter chimed
into a dead silence in which echoed Ain's words: "--really no point in
attempting."

Later they found he had been
explaining that the -virus utilized the body's own immunomechanisms, and
so defense was by definition hopeless.

That was all. Ain looked around
vaguely for questions and then started down the aisle. By the time he got
to the door, people were swarming after him. He wheeled about and said
rather crossly, "Yes, of course it is very wrong. I told you that. We are
all wrong. Now it's over."

An hour later they found he
had gone, having apparently reserved a Sinair flight to Karachi. The security
men caught up with him at Hong Kong. By then he seemed really very ill,
and went with them peacefully. They started back to the States via Hawaii.

His captors were civilized
types; they saw he was gentle and treated him accordingly. He had no weapons
or drugs on him. They took him out handcuffed for a stroll at Osaka let
him feed his crumbs to the birds, and they listened with interest to his
account of the migration routes of the common brown sandpiper. He was very
hoarse. At that point, he was wanted only for the security thing. There
was no question of a woman at all.

He dozed most of the way to
the islands, but when they came in sight he pressed to the window and began,
to mutter. The security man behind him got the first inkling that there
was a woman in it, and turned on his recorder.

" . . . Blue, blue and green
until you see the wounds. Oh my girl, Oh beautiful, you won't die. I won't
let you die. I tell you girl, it's over . . . Lustrous eyes, look at me,
let me see you now alive! Great queen, my sweet body, my girl, have I saved
you? . . . Oh terrible to know, and noble, Chaos' child green-robed in
blue and golden light . . . the thrown and spinning ball of life alone
in space . . . Have I saved you?"

On the last leg, he was obviously
feverish. "She may have tricked me, you know," he said confidentially to
the government man. "You have to be prepared for that, of course. I know
her!" He chuckled confidentially. "She's no small thing. But wring your
heart out—"

Coming over San Francisco
he was merry. "Don't you know the otters will go back in there? I'm certain
of it. That fill won’t last; there'll be a bay there again."

They got him on a stretcher
at Hamilton Air Base, and he went unconscious shortly after takeoff. Before
he collapsed, he'd insisted on throwing the last of his birdseed on the
field.

"Birds are, you know, warm-blooded,"
he confided to the agent who was handcuffing him to the stretcher. Then
Ain smiled gently and lapsed into inertness. He stayed that way almost
all the remaining ten days of his life. By then, of course, no one really
cared. Both the government men had died quite early, after they finished
analyzing the birdseed and throat-spray. The woman at Kennedy had just
started feeling sick.

The tape-recorder they put
by his bed functioned right on through, but if anybody had been around
to replay it they would have found little but babbling. "Gaea Gloriatrix,"
he crooned, "Gaea girl queen . . ." At times he was grandiose and tormented.
"Our life, your death!" he yelled. "Our death would have been your death
too, no need for that, no need."

At other times he was accusing.
"What did you do about the dinosaurs?" he demanded. "Did they annoy you?
How did you fix them? Cold. Queen, you're too cold! You came close to it
this time, my girl," he raved. And then he wept and caressed the bedclothes
and was maudlin.

Only at the end, lying in
his filth and thirst, still chained where they had forgotten him, he was
suddenly coherent. In the light clear voice of a lover planning a summer
picnic he asked the recorder happily:

"Have you ever thought about
bears? They have so much . . . funny they never came along further. By
any chance were you saving them, girl?" And he chuckled in his ruined throat
and later died.